Facebook game revenues up 12 % but Zynga down 37%

Facebook gaming showed positive growth in the first quarter, but long term partner Zynga wasn’t a contributor to this success.

Facebook reported net income of $219 million in the first quarter of its FY2103. As reported by GamesIndustry, the social network is minting it on ad revenue, especially on mobile, but also noted growth in games usage.

“Payments revenue from games was up 12%,” CFO David Ebersman said. “We’re pleased that Q1 represented our largest three month quarter of games revenue to date, despite a 37% drop in year over year payments volume from our largest developer, as our other developers increased their payments volumes by almost 60% and we saw a record number of people playing games on Facebook.”

That “largest developer” is, of course, Zynga – which may be credited with popularising Facebook as a monetised gaming platform, but has since found itself on a largely uninterrupted downward trend.

“Games revenue in Q1 benefited from the growth of games launched in the past year, and also from our efforts to increase game distribution, usage, and payments conversion,” Ebersman continued.

“We believe Facebook continues to offer a compelling platform for developers to build great games and businesses, and we will continue to invest in this area.”

“One thing that I think has actually gone well with platform recently is the gaming ecosystem,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in response to a question from an analyst.

“With the exception of our largest partner, Zynga, whose growth hasn’t been as awesome as everyone had hoped, the rest of the community is actually growing quite well and is quite healthy. We’re pretty happy with that, and it’s a pretty diverse group. We’re up to 81 of the top-grossing 100 iOS apps, and 70 of the top-grossing Android apps are connected in with Facebook, so we’re getting good coverage.”